How to get free (and legal) access to journal articles behind paywalls: the Open Access Button

I’m sure all of you engaged in research will be familiar with messages such as this:

It’s an example of what you see when you are trying to access a journal article and hit what’s known as a paywall. If you’re lucky, your institution has paid for a subscription: you log in and voila! The PDF appears! If you’re not so lucky, you might feel stumped and as if the only way to read the article is to pay the requested cost.

But, this isn’t necessarily the case? Did you know that usually authors are entitled to make a free version of the article available via their institution? If you’ve ever come to me asking for an article you can only find behind a paywall and I email you back a PDF in 5 minutes, it’s most likely that this is the version I’ve found.